Tuesday, November 16, 2010

The new version of Mathematica has arrived! I have been playing with it for a day now. It is a substantial upgrade from version 7. I will write more about the new features as I play with them. One new feature is the integration with Wolfram Alpha allowing the user to use free-form commands to produce results without the use of syntax; this is limited and for people who know Mathematica, it will not be much of an addition, but it does allow people who do not know the system to begin exploring. The results also include the correct Mathematica syntax for what it thinks you want.

This is an important paper for those of us who study compact objects. It begins with a nice overview of the theory of core-collapse supernovae (CCSN) and the efforts to model these. The next two sections details the code used, both MHD and GR. This is followed by the adaptive mesh scheme used. Finally they discuss the tests of the code. This accounts for half of the paper and makes a very nice overview of modeling MHD in a GR environment. The results are very nice, great paper!

This is a long paper (30 pages) explores the bounce during a supernova core collapse caused by the so-called quark hadron phase transition. The introduction is a nicce overview of the topic and its history. The second section, no pun intended, forms the theoretical core of the paper, describing the hybrid equation of state and other issues. The third section describes the simulation scheme. The fourth section explores the results of the model runs. The conclusion is that the quark matter description leads to early onset of deconfinement, a quark-gluon plasma. A very interesting paper!

Friday, November 5, 2010

We (MAST) are planning a Summer School on Computational Physics; this will tentaively be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Department of Physics and will be held from 15 June 2011 to 15 August 2011. Check out the MAST website for details.

We are exploring the possibility of Mathematica training over the web. This will include beginner training all the way up to advanced applications.